


Chasing Tail

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambition, Dogs, F/M, Falling In Love, Gen, Gender Identity, Internal Conflict, Loneliness, M/M, Other, Rating May Change, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-08-31 07:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8569498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: It was a mild summer day when Victor had his pheromone glands removed.





	1. Chapter 1

It was a mild summer day when Victor had his pheromone glands removed.

At the age of twenty and still unpresented, the glands were more of a danger to his career than anything else. A bruised and subsequently infected gland ended poor Diego de Sandoval’s career just before the season’s Grand Prix. The gland burst and gangrened with terrifying rapidity, partly due to the fact he was unpresented and the gland immature. Victor, listening with Christophe and Georgi to the horrific news in a New York hotel bar, had decided right then and there. He would have his glands removed as soon as the season was over.

“You’ll never present,” Christophe pointed out, vehemently enough that Victor was momentarily taken aback.

“You’re an alpha,” Georgi snapped.

It was loud enough that the bartender looked over at them. For a long moment, they were silent, waiting for the potential of being carded to pass. Once the bartender was distracted by a new customer, Georgi leveled an unusually dark glare at Christophe, who unconsciously drew himself up. The alpha instinct to become bigger when threatened. 

“Victor’s too old,” Georgi said, blunt and matter of fact. “He’d be a beta at best anyways.”

Christophe’s mouth twisted, but he didn’t argue any further. Georgi better understood Victor’s fears; he had presented as a beta earlier that year. He didn’t thank Georgi for it, though, not with how bald and raw the whole conversation had turned. They finished their drinks in uncomfortable, unhappy silence after Victor excused himself to call Yakov. 

“Are you sure?” was all Yakov asked, gruff and unreadable.

“Yes,” Victor said because he was twenty, unpresented, and had his whole life ahead of him but a career that would only last for as long as his body was in its prime.

Yakov supported Victor’s decision, so the surgery was scheduled as soon as possible. It was not an uncommon procedure, especially since the medical advances in understanding the role of the glands in determining alpha, beta, and omega in the sixties and seventies. It was very safe. Victor had no personal attachment to his glands. If he had been an alpha, it would have been different, but the chances of presenting as an alpha sharply declined after sixteen. Living as a beta was perfectly acceptable if mundane, but omegas suffered unfortunate yearly heats. Some doctors encouraged gland removal for those who had not presented by eighteen.

“Besides,” Yakov said before the anesthesiologist put Victor under, “you can’t play up your lack of presentation forever.”

For Victor was growing every day more a man, and his body reflected it. In his younger days, he could dance between masculine and feminine, and his lack of presentation had added to his mystique. With his shoulders broadening, jaw squaring, and narrowing in the waist, that slim and mutable silhouette he so adored was rapidly passing out of his reach. Victor found it infuriating. The past year had been wasted as he scrambled to adjust. It was sixteen and his initial adolescent changes all over again. He failed to present both times.

As the aesthesia took hold, all Victor could feel was relief.

 

The scars from the surgery are ugly. 

Victor does not regret the surgery. Not at all. He heals well, and his body encounters no ill effects. He competes with a newfound confidence that grows and grows to culminate in what will be the first of a record number of Grand Prix golds. 

He realises only in hindsight how bothered he was by his glands. By their immaturity. By alpha, beta, omega. It was like a sore in the back of his head. The last barrier between him and his full potential. 

The only reminder of the whole ordeal are the scars. Two neat, flat discoloured lines. They aren’t visible unless his legs are spread and even then one has to be rather close up. Victor tries not to look at them any more than he has to. They always make his sex partners pause. He had made it known that he had chosen to have his glands removed in a radio interview, and no one had commented beyond the beginning when asking if he had healed well. Of course, there was some gossip, but Victor has spent his life ignoring that. Scars, however, tend to be unsettling.

“Especially for this,” Christophe pointed out, during first of the numerous times they had ill-advised half-drunk sex. “You know, an omega smells best here.”

“You’re such an alpha,” Victor grumbled, nudging Christophe’s shoulder with his knee to remind him to get on with it.

“Can’t we just have sex?” he grouched the next time when Christophe paused yet again at the sight of the scars.

“Sorry,” Christophe said, and it was a rare sincere apology from him.

Because Victor tries not to make having sex with Christophe a regularly occurring thing, usually the reaction is just a brief widening of the eyes followed by rapid blinking. People shake it off. Victor is handsome, beautiful, desirable, and everything in between. He knows this lets him get away with a lot. Especially during sex.

So the issue is purely Victor. It’s pure vanity, but the scars are the only part of his body that he is regularly displeased with. They replaced the uncertainty of his presentation. He understands in hindsight that he had always subconsciously dreaded the answer. It makes sense that his displeasure would be transposed onto the scars.

“This sounds like psychobabble,” Georgi moans after Victor blathers about this while they and Anya are drinking in a private booth at a Macau nightclub. 

“It kind of is,” Victor agrees. “I’ve been reading those, those…” he flaps his hands, demonstratively; “You know what I’m talking about, it was on Buzzfeed—”

“Fuck Buzzfeed,” Georgi says as Anya laughs into her drink; “You could solve everything by _not having sex with Christophe_. Of all people.”

“That’s not the problem,” Victor says, suddenly irritated.

“Jesus Christ,” Georgi groans.

Victor gives up. It’s not worth delving into. The scars don’t hinder him. The only things that hinder Victor are himself and age. Both are unavoidable, but they may be planned for. Victor spends the off-seasons adjusting to the small changes to his body. To his expectations. To, with each successive gold medal, other people’s expectations. He spends his life shaping himself. Looking at himself. In the mirror. On video screens and phones and international broadcasts. He lives his life, with each passing day, more and more through other people’s eyes.

It makes Victor so very grateful for Makkachin. For dogs in general. Makkachin is the only presence in his life that doesn’t want anything from him. Who needs him. Makkachin’s love is unconditional. Even Victor doesn’t love himself unconditionally. He finds his continued underlying discomfort with the whole alpha, beta, and omega business irritating. Immature. Childish. He wishes that he could just leave it all behind. Throw it out like the surgeon did with his glands. 

But Victor is still human. He’s reminded of that every time his endurance flags or when he flubs a jump or even when he wears the wrong pair of socks and gets a blood blister on his ankle. He wishes he could just forget about the whole alpha, beta, and omega ordeal. It’s so outdated. It’s so unfashionable. But forgetting is impossible. It is an integral part of the human condition. 

Makkachin is, therefore, essential to Victor’s continued sanity. As a dog, Makkachin doesn’t care about all these silly human things. All dogs want are companionship, affection, and food, and usually those things in reversed order. Victor relates to dogs. He’s fond of food, and he craves affection. These are things available to him in droves, so he has to practice careful moderation, especially regarding food and where he seeks affection. Makkachin, though, is his only true companion. Everyone else gets tired of him. Makkachin never does.

Yakov frowns at him over their airplane salads. “I worry sometimes,” he admits, low and slow, like Victor is twelve again and doing too many jumps, “that you have attachment issues.”

Victor doesn’t say anything. He takes a bite of his salad. It has nine different ingredients, but all he can taste is cucumber. 

Sometime between his third and fourth Grand Prix golds, Victor begins to worry he might have removed more than just his pheromone glands.

 

His fifth Grand Prix gold tastes stale even as he dents it between his teeth.

He knows it shows. Maybe not to the media, who just want to lap up his fame and milk it for all it’s worth. Not even his fans seem to have caught on, eager as they are to dig deeper than what the media promotes. So it’s not obvious. He’s hidden it well enough. He has grown up from how transparent he was back around gold medal one or two. Back then, he had been so exhilarated. So excited. The world felt like a delicious oyster, and he was the diver discovering the pearl.

Now, the pearl has dulled. Yakov criticises Victor’s work ethic more than usual and harps on his endurance. The rest of the school notices, although none of them openly comment. Their eyes rest hot on his back. They track his every moment, tally every failure. They don’t do it to be unfriendly. They are students. Victor is the best example of this generation. They watch him to learn.

It means, too, that he is in a class of his own. Aside from Makkachin, he doesn’t have anyone to talk to. Yakov has nothing left to teach him, and they argue more often than not these days. Georgi and Victor haven’t gotten along since gold metal four, when Victor’s shadow truly grew long. Anya is dating an alpha, which hasn’t done much for Georgi’s self-esteem either. Christophe is no help, complaining the one time Victor talks to him over Skype about not having a good lay since the last time they’d had sex.

“You should come to Zürich,” he wheedles. “I’ll buy you lingerie and those champagne truffles you like so much.”

“No,” Victor says, although he’s sorely tempted.

Lying in bed with Makkachin, Victor wonders, as he usually does after talking to Christophe or another his failed relationships, if he really did lose something integral by going through with the surgery. It’s been nearly seven years. Physically, he has fulfilled and surpassed his own potential. Mentally, he is a genius in his field. Emotionally, he is strong and undaunted under pressure. He is the full package and more.

But he is not good with people. Perhaps he never was. He’s forgetful, and he’s flighty. He says what’s on his mind and has a tendency to hurt people. He finds himself at a crossroads between what he is and what he wants to be. He’s unsatisfied. Uninspired. The excuses he’s able to make due to his current success won’t last forever. There is no guarantee he’ll top himself and win a seventh Grand Prix gold. 

Victor doesn’t know if he wants another gold. He doesn’t know if he wants to top himself. In fact, as he skates around with his hands upraised in prayer, he isn’t sure if he wants to compete. If he wants to skate. If he wants any of this anymore. His heart aches. His stomach hurts. It’s impossible to look at himself when he washes between his legs. So instead of practicing jumps, he skates around in circles like a dog chasing its tail.

He’s bored. Maybe, he admits to himself after drinking too much and waking up alone on his kitchen floor, depressed. He hasn’t gone on a date or fucked around with Christophe in over a year. It’s lonely at the top, but Victor was lonely already. It’s a constant stream of salt in the wound. He begins, as he stumbles to the bathroom to clean up enough to take Makkachin out, to consider going to Zürich and making bad choices with Christophe just to feel some measure of normal.

Luckily, the winter wind shocks him out it.

“How uninspired,” he says to Makkachin; an old man passing by glances at them quizzically before hastily looking away.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t magically rejuvenate him. If anything, he gets worse. The new music for the routines he’s working on is perfect, but Victor feels like he’s underwater even when listening to the tracks at full blast. 

“You’re in a slump,” Yakov announces, when he comes to practice and finds Victor skating in circles for the third day in a row.

“Maybe,” Victor admits.

For a long moment, Yakov gapes at him. They so rarely agree on anything these days even though Yakov has always had Victor’s best interests in mind. Maybe because he has Victor’s best interests in mind. He had spent the entirety of last season harping. Too many jumps for his declining endurance. Too much alcohol and expensive food. Too many flings and distractions. Too much social media. To Yakov, Victor is in excess of everything except good sense and vegetables.

“Well,” Yakov starts, once they’ve sat down in his office and tea has been made, “maybe you should work with Georgi and Yuri.”

Victor sighs, adding only enough hot water to his tea to make it drinkable. Yakov has been trying to get him to mentor some of the other students, but it’s been counterproductive. Georgi and Victor haven’t managed to have a polite conversation in months. Victor doesn’t know how to talk to Yuri. If he presents as an alpha in the next year or two, he’ll be Victor’s obvious successor. He’s the brightest of the young stars in the school. He has the personality, however, of a grenade. He admires Victor, watches him attentively every time they share practice together, but their personalities clash. Every conversation that they’ve had over the past year has ended in an argument.

“Hormones,” Yakov snaps when Victor brings the issue up; “You reme—”

It hangs. The clock ticks. Victor sits. The tea steams. 

Eventually, Yakov breathes in. Sighs. He looks at Victor across the desk. The frown lines in his face run deep.

“The boy’s almost certainly an alpha,” he says; Yakov is a good coach and an even better reader of people. “He admires you. So just keep trying, will you?”

It is not unkind. It is, in fact, Yakov’s version of a compliment. It still hurts. Not horribly. Just the sharpness of a papercut. Victor sips his tea. Swallows.

“If he is an alpha,” he says, looking into the dark water, “I won’t be able to bring out his full potential.”

A long silence passes. 

“Vitya.” 

It is tight and twisted. Yakov is very angry. 

“You are perfectly able to do anything you set your mind to.”

The conversation ends with that. Victor goes home, feeling rattled and unsteady. He curls up on the couch with Makkachin and goes on Twitter. He has over a thousand notifications all about the same video. He’d seen it this morning but hadn’t watched it. People imitate his routines all the time.

He taps the link. In the split second before the video loads, Katsuki Yuuri stands frozen. In profile, he exudes a sense of calm coupled with intense concentration.

Victor breathes in.

He does what he always does when he’s in this sort of mood. 

He makes life changing decisions.


	2. Chapter 2

Victor is not surprised by Yuuri.

This is not a criticism. No one surprises Victor. He has built himself on surprising everyone, so there’s something wrong if it’s the other way around. Overall, everyone slots into neat categories. Figure skater, coach, support staff. Reporters, photographers, paparazzi. Alpha, beta, omega. Male, female, neither. There are so many people who flow through Victor’s life. This is the only way to keep track.

Victor knows Yuuri as a figure skater. He is twenty-three, male, and an alpha. He was Japan’s representative in last year’s Grand Prix, but he did not perform well. Victor remembers his short programme. It had such a lovely song. Yuuri shone through his sense of rhythm, but everything else was completely off. He had known it, too. His long programme was nothing short of a disaster. How regrettable, Victor had thought. He had such potential. He looked so sad when Victor ran into him in the hall.

“Wouldn’t have even guessed he’s an alpha,” Yuri commented once he, Victor, and Yakov were in the car on the way back to the airport.

“Alphas,” Yakov said as Victor struggled with the wrapper on his energy bar, “are just as liable to crack under pressure as everyone else.”

“Yakov,” Victor whined, holding the bar out, “open this for me.”

Thus, the video of Yuuri skating Victor’s programme is not surprising. It isn’t as if he magically performs all the jumps that Victor is known for. His rhythm and expressions shine unfettered.  Unpressured. Yuuri didn’t know he was being filmed. There is an exquisite beauty to the way he skates, even though he is out of shape. His strengths are on full display.

Victor, watching the video for the fifty-eighth time as he packs his toiletries, wonders why no one played these strengths up. Why did no one push him to develop himself around his strengths? Clearly, something isn’t working with his coaching team. 

Or maybe, Victor considers as he searches for Makkachin’s travel documents, it’s Yuuri himself. Maybe he’s the type of person who, knowing his strengths, marries them. Perhaps he views his weaknesses as separate issues, so they become overwhelming. There’s a lot of people like that. Georgi is like that. Mentally weak. Fragile. Prone to cracking under pressure. They need a fire lit underneath them. They need outside motivation. 

Victor can do that. Victor can be that. Yuuri is an alpha, but if Victor sets his mind to it, if he gives it his all—

“Yakov,” he says when the call he makes goes to voicemail; it’s nearly three in the morning; “I’m going to go away for a while.”

What a surprise that would be.

 

Katsuki Yuuri’s hometown is spread out, breathable, and absolutely nothing like St. Petersburg. It is nothing like Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, or Sapporo, which are the other cities that in Japan Victor has visited. It’s sleepy and slow and smells predominantly of the sea. There are people fishing at the railings of the same bridge that traffic runs across. Men and women stop to talk with each other as they pass, and children yell and laugh as they run home from school. Victor, in the taxi ride from the airport to Yu-Topia Akatsuki, takes it all in.

“I’m surprised,” the driver says, drawing Victor’s attention from the window, “that you’re staying at Yu-Topia. Most foreigners prefer the hotels in the city centre.”

Victor smiles, adjusting his fingers on the chain mesh door of Makkachin’s travel case. “I like traveling,” he says, “and seeing new things.”

None of the hotels in the city centre take pets that aren’t service animals. They’re all chains. Modern buildings with modern rooms and modern bedding that is sleek and cold and uninviting. He doesn’t say this. He isn’t here to criticise the tourist industry.

Yu-Topia is old-fashioned and relaxed. There’s a lived in feeling to every stone and corner. It’s the exactly opposite of Victor’s flat, of Victor’s world. 

“Thank you,” he says to Katsuki Toshiya, who greets him, Makkachin, and their initial baggage, “for accommodating me.”

“Thank you for choosing us,” Toshiya says, smiling mildly as Makkachin noses his feet.

Yuuri’s parents are younger than Yakov. Younger than Lilia. Victor would put them in the early middle age category based upon their posture and movements. They have a daughter, Mari, who looks at Victor narrowly but smiles warmly when Makkachin greets her. They are all, from the sugar-sweet smell they give off, omegas. Despite himself, it makes that uncomfortable part in Victor uncoil. 

“We had a dog,” Toshiya explains, apparently because Victor has given himself away. “It’s so nice to have another around.”

“Thank you,” Victor says, and he means it.

They give him a pamphlets about the inn and hotsprings and a local map in English. There’s a dining area where three locals (beta, beta, alpha) are despairing over a football game. Victor smiles and waves at them when they turn to gaze at him curiously, but he’s glad to follow Toshiya away to complete the tour. 

“Do you,” he asks when they are standing outside in a small grassy area that Makkachin will be able to use, “know why I’m here?”

Toshiya and Hiroko look at him. Their expressions remains pleasant, but Toshiya’s eyes are focused for the first time since he rubbed Makkachin’s head in greeting. 

“Yuuri,” Hiroko says.

Victor nods. He would explain himself to them if he could. It is not just the language barrier.

They complete the tour, and Victor readies himself for a bath. It’s early evening, and the men that were watching football are around. Victor ignores them as he washes up, paying close attention to the faucets and where to put his towel. It’s cold outside, but Victor is used to that. Glad for it even. It means the outdoor onsen is completely empty. 

He spends the next half hour soaking. Letting his muscles unwind. He looks up at the sky, which is clouded over and makes the mistake of fully inspecting the tanuki statue. The hot water, steady in temperature, does wonders for his back and feet. He spends rather too much time wriggling his toes under the water and revealing that they don’t pop. 

It’s the sort of place, he thinks as he sinks back and looks across the water, people come to when they retire.

Victor isn’t coming here to retire. 

Yuuri slams through the door and stares at him.

Victor is going to be his coach. He is going to make Yuuri win.

To be fair, he doesn’t really have a plan besides that. What he outlines to Yuuri is exactly all he has. He cannot be misunderstood because there is no complexity to the situation. All of Victor’s big life decisions have been made suddenly, simply, and with absolute certainty. Having his glands removed. Hooking up with Christophe. Becoming Yuuri’s coach. Victor is the type of person who makes decisions and works out how to make them viable as he goes.

Yuuri, predictably, is completely and utterly surprised.

He falls backwards. He gapes like an electrocuted fish. Victor stands in the water. Hand extended. Showing all.

Yuuri screams.

 

This is no surprise. 

Victor gets out of the water while Yuuri recovers. He towels off and dresses himself as Yuuri sputters the beginnings of questions he doesn’t finish. They end up in the dining room where Victor has a glass of water and then grabs Makkachin to catch some shut eye. He feels more than a little lightheaded from standing up from the hot water as abruptly as he did. He has a tendency to come on too strong when he hasn’t been sleeping. He hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. When travelling, he usually curls up on Yakov on the plane or with someone in the hotel or with Makkachin when he gets home. He sleeps best with someone warm and breathing, with a heartbeat next to his ear heavy and steady. This time, Makkachin was in cargo. Yakov was back in St Petersburg. 

Victor is very tired. He isn’t a nice person when he’s tired. Christophe used to keep him up on purpose to get him to lash out. 

“You’re so sexy when you’re angry,” he would tease when Victor grouched at him to get out of the way for the shower.

Victor wakes up with a sneeze, an exclamation above him, and an internal surge of annoyance. Hunger, too.

“I’m starving,” he says to Yuuri and a woman he doesn’t know; he corrects himself, to English, “Hungry.”

Yuuri scrambles. He flails, all uncoordinated movement. He looks so soft and scared. His salt-savoury alpha scent is strong with every shift, every gesture. It enhances how nervous he is. Victor has lived his entire life competing against that smell.

It turns out Yuuri smells almost exactly like his favourite dish. Katsudon. Victor enjoys it for what it is. He especially likes the crunchy texture to the pork and how it gives away to soft, juicy meat. He remembers the food he’s had when he’s gone out in Tokyo and Sapporo, and he himself has a particular fondness for the pickled things that accompany beer and sake. He can see how Yuuri’s vice would end up being food. Vices are dangerous. They have to be nipped in the bud else they fester and gangrene. As out of shape as Yuuri is, it’s dangerous for Victor to coach him. 

No matter, Victor shrugs internally as they begin moving his luggage into a suitable room. This will give him more time to plan. He watches Yuuri move boxes and is reassured that, despite the weight of some of them, he’s more than capable of heavy physical activity. His arms and legs appears equally  strong, which is even better. The commentary he’d seen online about a possible injury affecting Yuuri’s performance are untrue. Only his weight is the issue. That’s straightforward enough, but it’s something that Yuuri has to do on his own. 

So what can Victor do in the interim? As he lifts one of the boxes to stack higher than Yuuri can reach, he runs over in his mind what he has with Yakov. He sleeps with Yakov. He makes Yakov angry. He goes running to Yakov when things go wrong. He’s known Yakov through his divorce from Lilia, and Yakov held his hand before and after Victor’s pheromone gland removal. Yakov is like a father. He is the only person who knows Victor at all.

“Yuuri,” Victor says, kneeling down so that their eyes are level; Yuuri’s skin is soft, no four o’clock shadow beneath his chin, “tell me everything about yourself. What kind of rink do you skate at? What is in this city? Do you have anyone you like?”

His scent shifts. His pupils contract. Alpha soaking out of his pores. Victor feels himself smile. He’s hit something besides shock and nervousness, which is all he’s gotten out of Yuuri so far aside from bewilderment. Good.

“Before we start practicing,” he says as the air blooms in savoury alpha scent, “let’s build some trust into our relationship.” 

Yuuri squawks and runs backwards on his hands and feet until he slams into the wall. He still reeks of alpha scent, but everything else about his demeanour telegraphs rejection. Victor blinks. 

“What?” he asks because Yuuri smells of desire; Victor knows what that smells like. “Why are you running away?”

“No reason!” Yuuri squeaks.

He excuses himself swiftly after that, his alpha scent still strong as he scuttles down the hall to what Victor has to guess is his room. Victor scratches the back of his neck before setting about taking out his suitcase and a couple of Makkachin’s toys. He must have missed something. There are many levels to alpha and omega scents. Victor isn’t able to smell all of them. He’s gotten into endless trouble with lovers and fellow skaters this way. 

There’s no point in apologising because it would take far too long to explain. He just has to keep trying with what he does know. Yuuri desires him. He wants Victor, and his scent has not been accompanied by the acrid scent of hate at any point in all of this. There’s the taste of salt that alphas tend to leave behind, but Victor is only able to tell the nuances of that if he’s very close.

Christophe smells of salt when he asks Victor to stay the night. Yakov smells of salt when he wakes up and finds Victor curled up on his lap. This knowledge brings Victor to Yuuri’s door where he’s promptly rejected again. There’s a flurry of movement inside the room, which makes no sense, but Yuuri doesn’t respond to Victor’s next few calls even as his alpha scent seeps out from under the door. It’s stronger than ever.

That, more than anything else, makes Victor back off. Yuuri isn’t typical in the realm of alpha behaviour, but it’s obvious he has an alpha’s instinct. Victor doesn’t want to risk being perceived as a threat to Yuuri. That would be counterproductive. 

It leaves Victor with nothing to do but set up his bedding in the clear space of his room’s floor and finally check his phone. There’s over a thousand emails and even more notifications on his apps, so he ignores those in favour of the thirteen missed calls. There’s ten from his agent, one from his solicitor, and two from Yakov. Only his agent and solicitor left messages, both requesting that he call them back. 

There’s only one text message. It’s from Georgi and simply reads: 

_Don’t watch Yakov’s press conference_

And, because Victor is who he is, he opens up Twitter and almost immediately finds the press conference. Yakov holds himself well for the first two minutes until the rumour that’s the truth comes up and Yakov inflates, drawing up and bursting with all the alpha he has, grabs a reporter’s microphone and screams—

“That man thinks only of himself! He’ll never be anyone’s coach!”

Victor locks his phone. Drops it away from his head. He wraps his arms around Makkachin and stares at the ceiling.

It hurts, more than Victor likes to admit, to hear Yakov say that. It isn’t as if Yakov hasn’t said such things to Victor before, but it was always in private. In the car or the hotel after a bad interview. In his office or over the phone. Time after time when Victor came crying to him over another bauched relationship. Yakov has always told him how it is. How he is. Yakov always supported Victor, even when it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Makkachin,” he hears himself say more than he feels; “Makkachin.”

The love of a dog is unconditional. Simple. Makkachin is warm and soft, and yet Victor—

Yakov’s right. He really does only think of himself.

 

He feels a great deal less despairing in the morning.

It’s a bit unusual to eat rice and drink tea for breakfast, but it’s a good meal to start to the day. Yuuri stares at him from the other side of the teapot like he had thought the evening before was some sort of elaborate hallucination. He eats some sort of gelatinous grey dish that he describes as diet food. 

“It doesn’t have much taste,” he says when Victor tries a piece and finds it to be true.

“Good to see you’re committed,” Victor says after eating the last of his rice to chase the strange taste of nothing away. 

Yuuri actually smiles. It makes something uncoil between them. Victor get up to unpacks his bike and demands that Yuuri run with him and Makkachin. Yuuri grimaces but gets up and goes to get dressed. It’s satisfying. Victor is serious about being a coach. Yuuri seems to be alpha enough to want him. Yakov is wrong. Victor is going to prove it.

Getting to know Yuuri isn’t easy. They make little progress over the next week and a half. Aside from discovering that Yuuri has better physical endurance than most and that Japanese diet regimes are just as grim as Russian, Victor can barely get Yuuri to talk about himself let alone express more than what his scent gives away. 

Yuuri’s scent gives away a lot. Usually, his scent blends into the smell of the kitchen or the sea. It’s nearly identical to the seaweed that washes up on the beach or the katsudon that is an ever present temptation. The calmer he is, the saltier his scent; the more agitated or nervous, the more he smells like cooked pig. Victor isn’t used to keeping tabs on a singular alpha’s scent for such a prolonged period of time. It makes him nervous.

It’s most noticeable when Yuuri watches him on the ice. Victor isn’t about to let himself loose any ground, so he practices at the local ice rink under the amazed gazes of Yuuri and his friends. Yuuri’s alpha scent fills the rink while Victor practices, and it’s only because he has lived his life around competitive alphas that he is able to go about his routines. 

He doesn’t block it out. Instead, when he is skating, he revels in it. Yuuri’s friends are a beta and an omega, and their scents waft to accompany Yuuri’s alpha like a full bouquet. Victor imagines the scents as colours. He fills his lungs with the cold air and pheromones, and, as he becomes briefly, wonderfully airborne:

He imagines he is complete.

 

Yuri Plisetsky shows up to everyone’s surprise except Victor.

If anyone was going to chase him down, it would be Yuri. He’s the youngest of Yakov’s senior skaters, and he has the most freedom of movement. He supports his family with his sponsorship, so he has no blood relatives who could hold him back. He’s always been a loose cannon, which makes him chafe under Yakov as much as benefit. He’s unpresented with so much room to grow.

“You,” he screams as Victor skates in pretend thought, “look like you’re doing great, Victor!”

Victor does feel a little bad. Yakov is right: Yuri admires him. He didn’t deliberately forget that he’d promised to choreograph Yuri’s senior debut. Victor, unfortunately, has a tendency to forget a lot of things, including promises he made without planning them out beforehand. Yuuri’s scent is unhappy and nervous, and it skyrockets as the situation escalates. Victor can do nothing to stop it. He did make a promise. 

So, two competing promises. He promised Yuuri he would be his coach. That he would make him win. He promised Yuri that he would choreograph his senior debut. That he would give him the best senior debut ever. The obvious solution is to make them compete against each other. He has the music. He might not be able to make any decisions on tracks for himself, but maybe if he’s choreographing for someone other than himself the music will stop sounding like it’s all underwater. 

Yuuri hates the idea. Yuri, though:

“Victor will do whatever the winner says!”

Oh, thank God, Victor thinks. That makes this so much easier. It’s even easier to hand off the planning and setup of the two event to those rambunctious triplets. It’s not so easy to ignore how unhappy Yuuri’s scent is, but there isn’t much that Victor can do. He doesn’t break his promises, even those that he forgets. Based on Yuri’s continuing rudeness, which increases with agitation, and Yuuri’s heavy, unhappy alpha scent that grows more and more savoury, Victor has mucked this up royally.

He doesn’t know how to fix it. Normally, he would go running to Yakov, but now he can’t. Yakov might hate him now. Victor is on his own. He threw himself out to sink or swim. He’ll just have to make this up as he goes.

These are the thoughts that chase themselves around in his head when Yuuri comes back after showing Yuri to the family’s bath. He stands in the doorway for a moment before crossing to sit down on the floor at the base of Victor’s bed. Victor retrieves Makkachin’s dematting comb from under the couch. He cups Makkachin’s head as Yuuri breathes out. Not quite a sigh but close. 

“He’s going to be an alpha, isn’t he.”

It’s not a question. Victor works the comb carefully through the fur behind Makkachin’s left ear. 

“Yakov is convinced.”

A movement of fabric. One of Yuuri’s joints pop. He sighs. Deep and slow. Victor untangles a small clump of fur where Makkachin’s ear meets skull.

“Do you agree?”

Victor stares at the comb. He lifts his left hand. Slides the hair that’s come loose in it off. A few grains of salt and some dirt, too. He needs to bathe Makkachin. 

“Yakov knows this sort of thing,” he says, leaning over to dump the fur and debris in the bin behind the couch.

Silence. Victor doesn’t dare look at Yuuri. They both know he hasn’t answered the question. 

There isn’t an answer. Not yet.

 

Dinner is a strange affair. Yuri enjoys the food. He eats and drinks ravenously, like he should for his age and the amount of running around he must have done in the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Victor isn’t particularly hungry. He eats a bowl of tsukemono mostly to be polite and drinks beer. Yuuri has a bowl of odd smelling noodles and very plain vegetables. He eats it with the determination of a man condemned until his sister calls him away to help set up Yuri’s room. 

It isn’t until Yuri doesn’t return for over an hour to finish his meal that Victor realises something wrong. He pulls himself up, dresses, and texts Minako, who apparently will know where Yuuri has gotten off to. There’s a short pause as he changes his trousers before Minako texts him back with an address. A bar that she works at some nights. She gives him a long, piercing look as she pours him a glass of beer. Her alpha scent is forcibly banked so he can’t read her.

“My place is my studio,” she says after Victor lets her study him, and the beer warms him faintly; he misses vodka. “He’s not there, so he’ll probably be at the rink.”

Sure enough, that’s where Victor finds him. Takeshi and Yuko are around, too, and Victor wonders if Yuuri bothered them to open the rink for him. The children aren’t around; Victor wonders if they have family to watch them. Everyone seems to have so much family here. It’s so different from his life. From what he knows of Yuri’s life. 

He watches Yuuri skating figures as his friends talk. He’s able to follow the general gist of their conversation, but it isn’t anything he hadn’t already guessed. Yuuri doesn’t act like a stereotypical alpha. Generally, alphas draw people to them simply due to the composition of their pheromones. Yuuri reeks of his alpha scent, so he clearly has that natural charisma. It’s no surprise that he hates losing; alphas can’t stand being anything less than the best. 

Victor breathes in. Closes his eyes. He scents the air. Ice. Cleaning products. Makkachin silent against his legs. Takeshi’s sweet omega. Yuko’s milky beta. Yuuri. He takes these things and holds them close within his breast. In that empty space, where he’s torn out so many things, he imagines laying down wood for kindling.

He opens his eyes. Touches a finger to his lips. His fingertips to Makkachin’s head.

“A magic spell to change the little piggy into a prince…”

He just needs to find a match.

 

Yuuri and Yuri stand before him. Yuuri’s savoury scent is strong like someone is grilling meat right next to rink. Yuri stands straight and open. Even without presentation, he has a draw, a presence that cannot be ignored. They stare at him, seeping desire and ambition from every pore. Victor turns the remote control for the stereo in his hand. 

He is powerful in these moments.

“This piece,” he describes, watching the way their faces move, the subtle interplay of muscles shifting in bodies trained from their earliest days to react and read music, “comes in two arrangements, each with a different theme. ‘On Love: Eros and Agape.’ Have you ever thought about love?”

They twitch. Shake their heads. It’s not surprising. At their ages, Victor hadn’t either. 

At Yuri’s fifteen, Victor was bursting at the seams. Yakov yelled at him, but there was no way way to hold him back. He was naive but talented, and he didn’t have all the fears and uncertainties that collected within him as he got older. To Victor at nearly sixteen, the world was undiscovered and exciting.

At Yuuri’s twenty-three, Victor had two Grand Prix golds hanging on his neck. They had not yet grown heavy, and the gold luster made him feel like he had no limits. He kissed Christophe, and, despite their differences, they both thought they could rule the world. Only the scars between Victor’s thighs bothered him.

Now, watching Yuri and Yuuri react to Agape and then Eros, Victor feels all of the twenty-seven years he is. He can feel the weight of the innocence he lost somewhere in the last decade. He can feel the weight of the eroticism that he’s woven so deeply into his character in place of what he removed. Love in these forms is stale on him. In him.

“It’s creepy how you don’t have a scent,” Georgi told him once.

It was over a year ago. He and Anya were in a rough patch, and Victor had made the mistake of taking Georgi out drinking. Georgi was a morose drunk at best, and, since they’d been drinking vodka and not cocktails, he had slipped quickly from morose to mean.

“Hey,” Victor said, setting down his glass. 

“It’s not fair,” Georgi grouched, gripping his own glass and glaring at the bottom. “Why couldn’t we be alphas?”

“Georgi—”

“Or even omegas!” Georgi said, very loudly. 

The shout shocked him back to himself, and he immediately shut his mouth and put his head down, beet red. Victor swallowed. He looked at his own drink. At the bar top. To where his hands had reflexively clasped over his lap. His heart hammered in his chest.

“Sorry,” Georgi whispered the next day when he showed up unusually late to practice.

Victor smiled and pat him on the shoulder. It wasn’t forgiveness, but Victor wasn’t going to hold a grudge. That’s what Georgi, in his emotional turmoil, would have wanted. 

Victor doesn’t do what people want. There is nothing productive about that. In this world, the only way to keep moving forward to fill it with surprises. To defy their expectations. The easiest way to do the opposite of what everyone expects. That’s the easiest route but the hardest for people to stomach. Most people won’t chose such a route for themselves.  

It is the culmination of Victor’s genius that he opts to do it on his own. Looking at Yuuri and Yuri in front of him, horrified by their skating assignments:

“You’re both far more ordinary and mediocre than you think.”

They take it as a criticism, but it’s not. It’s just the truth. Victor himself is ordinary. Painfully so. He removed his pheromone glands. He will never be anything else than what he already is. As a skater, he fulfilled his potential to be the very best. He knows exactly what he can do. The two skaters in front of him don’t.

“You need to be more self-aware,” he says because it will cut; it will stick into the flesh and either fester or grow. “I’m surprised that you think you can choose your own image. From the audience’s perspective, you’re just a piglet and a kitten. If you aren’t up to my standards by next week, I won’t choreograph programmes for either of you. Since you are my fans, I’m sure you will manage.”

This is true, too. Yuuri was able to capture the musicality and emotion of Victor’s Grand Prix routine. Yuri has spent the last four years observing Victor close up in practice and competition. They have potential. They have motivation. Vision. Drive.

“I’ll skate to ‘Agape’,” Yuri shouts, and he leans into Victor’s space, unconsciously gulping the air; he’s so young, so on edge. “My senior debut depends on it! You better give me a programme that will let me win!”

“It’s your choice to win or not,” Victor says, “but if I skated the programme, I would definitely win.”

Because he would make it so. Victor won’t let anything hold himself back, including himself. Yuri is too young to have realised this yet. It just riles him up more.

“If I win, you’ll come back to Russia. You’ll be my coach! That is what I want.”

There is force there, even if there isn’t yet a scent to accompany it. There is no doubt: he will be an alpha, too. Incredible, Victor thinks. Yakov is always right about this.

“Sure,” he says because those are fair terms; he looks to Yuuri, who hasn’t recovered; his eyes are dark and wide and desperate; “Yuri, what about you? What would you like if you win?”

Yuuri blinks. He breathes in. Blinks again. He breathes out. He looks up. For the first time, there’s a spark in his eyes. Yuri shifts. Leaning forward. Unconsciously responding to the challenge with the will to fight. 

“Victor,” Yuuri says; it is heavy; it is a command, and it grows with each word; “I want to eat katsudon with you. I want to keep winning, and keep eating katsudon. So I will skate to ‘Eros’! I will give all the eros I’ve got!”

Something deep inside of Victor twists. Untwists. It is unfamiliar. Unknown. 

For a single, wonderful moment, he is surprised. And that feels—

“Great,” he says, and he means it. “I like that a lot.”


	3. Chapter 3

Skating Eros is easy.

“I,” Yuuri looks, smells, and feels completely alarmed, “think I can do it if I try!”

Or it would be if it was Victor skating it. Victor only needs to imagine Christophe and their off-and-on relationship to drum up ideas of what the programme should evoke. The goal would be that he should have Christophe trying to jump his bones halfway. Victor skating to Eros would be about making the audience so mad with desire that they would overlook his lack of scent and how he is all performance.

This is not Victor. This is Yuuri, and Yuuri is an alpha. An alpha’s scent cannot lie, and Yuuri is a painfully honest person on top of that. He cannot lie to himself and therefore influence his own scent. What he feels is what he is, whether or not he has words for it. Perhaps especially if he doesn’t have words for it.

“That’s,” Yakov said when Yuuri first broke onto the scene and they were watching video of him for analysis, “a glass alpha if I ever saw one.”

“He’s got great musicality,” Georgi observed.

“Good step sequences,” Victor agreed.

He very clearly remembers this conversation because both he and Georgi were eating ice cream. This was an incredibly rare, nearly momentous occasion because Yakov had not only permitted them ice cream but had treated them. Victor was allowed to add jam, and Georgi was allowed his absolute favourite thing in the world: a fresh waffle cone. He cradled it throughout the video analysis session, nibbling slowly long after the ice cream was gone.

“Fear has large eyes,” Yakov said with complete finality.

Georgi chuckled. Victor felt uncomfortable. When he looked at Yuuri a few years later in the hallway, he had thought the same thing. Large eyes full of fear. Yuuri dropped his gaze and rushed away. It hadn’t matched the scent of desire. It hadn’t matched the competitive spirit he had displayed in the years of his professional career. Nothing added up about Katsuki Yuuri. 

“You have the skill to win,” Victor points out, standing across from him on the ice. “Why can’t you make that happen?”

Yuuri shrinks into himself. Shuffles his hands. His scent banks. A doused fire.

“I lack confidence.”

A lot of people lack confidence. It’s reassuring that Yuuri is able and willing to admit to this. It makes everyone’s jobs here easier. The problem is right in front of them, laid bare. 

It is a problem that Victor feels he is able to address. Victor himself lacks confidence. He’s built his success by measuring others. He’s a master of cutting himself in the image that others project upon him. He finds the fine balance between what they consciously desire him to be and what they subconsciously desire even more. He fills in the gaps. He makes them whole. 

“Right,” he says. “Then my job is make you feel confident in yourself.”

He moves forward. Yuuri starts to baulk, but Victor grabs him by the chin. His pupils expand and contract. Victor passes his thumb along Yuuri’s bottom lip. Brushes his upper lip. Yuuri isn’t breathing. Isn’t scenting.

He doesn’t need to.

“No one,” Victor murmurs, “in this whole wide world knows your true eros, Yuuri. There may be an alluring side to you that you yourself are unaware of.”

There is no real uncertainty. Yuuri is an alpha, and he has an alpha’s promise. He has access to the exquisite alpha charm, which some call the most appealing force in the world. Victor has spent a lifetime imitating it, just as he has imitated beta and omega qualities. As an professional, it is his greatest ability. For how great an athlete he is, he must excel equally as a performer.

“Can you show me what that is soon?”

If Yuuri is going to achieve any further success, he has to become confident as a performer. He has to engage his audience and not only please but surprise them. He has the athletic ability; he has the natural alpha draw; but he is weak because his lack of confidence turns him inward. Except in a few select moments, Yuuri comes off as withdrawn. Cold, even. It doesn’t make him popular. It prevents him from growing.

“Think,” Victor says as Yuuri’s face fills with horror, “long and hard about what eros means to you.”

Yuuri needs to find this for himself before Victor can draw him out. He’s too old and too set in his ways at this point to mould him into something entirely new. He has a whole career behind him already, and Victor is inheriting him in what should be his prime. It is too late to fix his fragility. Victor must build Yuuri up from what he currently has.

It is not a poor foundation. Watching Yuuri skate off the ice in a daze to go stretch out, Victor feels a bit like he’s looking at half of a statue in a museum. Parts of Yuuri are so expertly polished that he’s afraid to touch them. Others are missing or badly damaged. Experts argue if the statue should be repaired or left as is.

Yuri, on the other hand, is the stone with only the beginning of a shape.

“I’m doing it like you showed me, aren’t I?” he snarls.

He is hunched over. Teeth bared. A hungry, half-mad light dances in his eyes, although that’s probably a combination of Victor’s imagination and the afternoon light. He looks like a wild animal. 

“The way you are now,” Victor says, and it’s flat, matter of fact; Yakov is a prominent echo inside of his head, “your greed is too obvious.”

A muscle in Yuri’s neck stretches. He’s clenching his teeth. He recognises Yakov, too, and doesn’t appreciate it. Even so, Victor plows forward.

“There’s absolutely no agape in your performance,” and because he knows that drawing comparisons to Yuuri will force his words to strike home: “It’s good to have confidence, but this isn’t a programme where you should show off.”

“ _Huh?_ ” and it’s so self-righteous, so incredulous; “Victor, you’re the one who skated it with complete confidence! What’s agape to you, then?”

If Victor was a different, more sensitive person, he would burst out laughing. He isn’t. He is who he is, and the truth of the matter is that Victor has no real idea what love is. He is simply an expert in imitating it. 

That, for all his success, is what makes him a genius.

 

By default, Victor’s particular brand of genius makes him into an unlikeable person.

It was, in his junior days, the main quality that Yakov worried about. Victor was high energy as a junior and often times impossible to reign in, especially when he initially hit puberty. He was easily distracted and even more prone to flights of fancy. He found sitting through regular school lessons unbearable. The only thing that kept him in school was the knowledge that Yakov wouldn’t be allow him to compete if he didn’t complete education. 

“I wish,” Yakov said, back when Victor was fourteen and had already far outgrown the junior group, “that you could be an alpha. It would make your life so much easier.”

“Why would I want to be an alpha?” Victor asked, not long after he turned sixteen and alphas seemed to be popping out of the woodwork simply to drive him crazy. “They’re all assholes.”

“I’m an alpha,” Yakov scowled. “Am I an asshole?”

“Yes!” Victor shouted before executing a quad flip.

“What if,” Victor said, at eighteen as he and Georgi were in a cab in London on the way home from a club, “Yakov turns out to be, like, the alpha whisperer and the government finds out and someone comes and takes him away and we have to find a new coach–”

“Victor,” Georgi groaned; he’d had far too many Jägerbombs. “Shut up.”

They ended up having to pull over so that Georgi could vomit in a decorative planter box while Victor fumbled out money for the cab. Yakov yelled at them when he came to wake them up the next day. Victor, with only spotty memory of the night before, laughed and felt relieved. Yakov, Victor understood even then, the most influential person in his life.

It means that Victor has very little personal experience with love. Agape or Eros are, for Victor, things that exist outside of himself. They exist in others, who are more fertile soil for love to blossom and bloom. He’s studied it in Christophe. In Yakov. But the best example was in Georgi, in the early, tentative days of his relationship with Anya. They were on the best terms then, and Victor had invited Georgi over after practice for tea. They puttered around in the kitchen together while it brewed, searching for Victor’s wayward jam pot.

“Do you like her?”

A sideways glance. Georgi smiled a little, just with the left side of his mouth. He set spoons on the counter. Victor worked the lid off the jam. The sweet scent of summer berries curled up under his chin, over his lips.

“She smells good,” Georgi murmured, reaching out to take the kettle off the stove. “Like pelmeni.”

“You better not tell her that,” Victor snorted.

Georgi shoved him in the shoulder, but his eyes were laughing. Victor turned. Reached out and curled their fingers together. Georgi smiled at him, kettle in his other hand. It softened the natural sharpness of his features. His watery beta scent felt warm. Like steam.

“Go for it,” Victor urged, squeezing Georgi’s hand; “She’s single, right? What’ve you got to lose?”

Victor, lying in bed and looking at Anya’s recent Instagram posts, bites his lip. This isn’t his fault, he knows. People fall in and out of love. It’s Georgi or Anya’s fault that things have turned out this way. Anya is an alpha, which matters insomuch as being a man or a woman or neither matters. For some people, it’s more; for others, it’s less. Not everyone is like Victor, who has never felt comfortable nailed down to one or another. Then again, Victor isn’t like everyone else. Most people like to slot themselves into categories. They make a home for themselves there.

Victor groans at himself. He sits up in bed and pinches the bridge of his nose. Makkachin stirs, uncurling, stretching, and yawning as Victor snorts and gropes around for a tissue. He clears his sinuses and uses the clean half of the tissues to wipe the sleep out of the corners of Makkachin’s eyes. He kisses wet nose and earns a sleepy lick to his chin in return. He needs to shave.

“Eurgh…”

Yu-Topia is still dark by the time he leaves for his morning run. Despite the laidback feeling to the city, it’s well-lit, and the footpaths are safe even before dawn. Victor can’t imagine St. Petersburg city council ever getting its act together enough to be so organized let alone Moscow. Then again, it’s a different country. Different city.

“Are you hungry, Makkachin?”

They stop by a 7-Eleven. Victor buys himself plain tofu and Makkachin a packet of fish-flavour treats. He sits on the bench in front of Ice Castle, eating the tofu after draining it in the grass and tossing Makkachin a couple of treats.

“This is nice,” he tells Makkachin, who looks at him pleadingly for a third treat. “I don’t know why Yakov hates tofu. It has a good taste.”

He offers Makkachin a spoonful, which is anything but rejected. Victor nods approvingly as Makkachin licks the spoon clean, tail wagging a thousand miles per hour.

“See?” he says, dumping the spoon back into the now empty container. “It’s good.”

Takeshi shows up just as Victor and Makkachin really get into wrestling each other on the pavement. He stares curiously at Victor, who’s chest is heaving beneath Makkachin’s weight on his torso.

“Are you okay?” he asks, puzzled and a little concerned.

“Yes,” Victor says, struggling up from under Makkachin, who slides off without protest. “Thank you for coming early to open the rink.”

“No problem,” Takeshi says, the look on his face clearly communicating he thinks Victor is a few bottles short of a full bar.

The ice feels fresh and exciting today. Victor skates figures only briefly before starting to play around with jumps, chasing the exquisite high those bring him. He feels, for the first time in ages, good. The scrape of his skates, the burning in his muscles, the cold in his lungs: he feels so free. So invigorated. He can almost hear music, although that remains just out of reach.

“So frustrating,” he complains to the air.

“What the hell,” Yuri’s voice cuts in; he and Yuuri have apparently arrived at some point and are leaning on the wall next to the door.

Victor skates over to them. Plops his hands over each of their heads and ruffles their hair, making them both startle and squawk. Yuuri’s scent curls salty and savoury just from that bit of contact. Yuri scowls at him but doesn’t vocally protest the contact.

“I hope you’re not going to make us do that,” he grumbles as Victor lifts his arms and stretches until he yawns.

“Do what?” Victor asks after he finishes yawning.

They both stare at him like he’s grown another head. “Three quadruple flips?” Yuri asks, his voice rising with every word.

“Oh,” Victor says, leaning down to clean his skate off. “I didn’t notice. But if you want want to do that, you can try.”

He feels, even as they gawk at him, happy. Relaxed. It’s novel.

Life in Hasetsu has been the longest period of time Victor has been away from Yakov since he was twelve. Aside from Makkachin, there’s no one waking him up at five in the morning. There is no one to remind him to eat his vegetables. There is no one who will make him old-fashioned tea. If he wants to have tea the Russian way, he has to make it himself, and Japanese water for Russian tea tastes different. 

“Don’t give me tea and tell me to calm down!” Yuri screams at the end of the second day of practice. “I came here to get away from Yakov!”

Victor laughs merrily. Yakov is like a horsemaster. Victor is a genius, and he’s also one of Yakov’s wildest students. Part of Victor’s greatness as a skater is how Yakov broke him down over and over again. There is no part of Victor’s career that Yakov has not touched or helped to shape. Yuri has come to the wrong place if he wants to run away.

Yuuri won’t drink the tea either. He’s polite about it, refusing with a distinct scent of salty alarm every time Victor offers. His skittishness doesn’t appear to be about to subside anytime soon, although he does settle down in practice. Victor can’t say he understands either of them, but he himself is inexperienced as a coach. It doesn’t help that the stone he has to carve with each of them has completely different elements. 

“In the end,” Victor says, “it’s up to them, Makkachin. They have to decide if they want to fight or run away.”

Makkachin gazes at him dolefully. Victor rolls his eyes. He tips the bottle of dog conditioner to fill his palm before reaching out to rub it over Makkachin’s belly, earning a long, snorted sigh for his efforts. The water in the tub is starting to get cold.

Mari knocks on the door frame as Victor is drying Makkachin off about twenty minutes later. It startles Victor, and for a moment they blink at each other. Victor has to force himself to loosen his grip on Makkachin’s chest. Mari blinks at him, looking vaguely puzzled. She breathes in. Blinks again. A faintly startled look passes over her face before she catches herself and hides it behind her characteristic bland expression.

“I will clean the tub,” she says.

“Ah,” Victor says; he wouldn’t have known what products to use nor would he have known how to express it in English. “Thank you.”

Neither Yuuri nor Yuri are back yet. Victor changes clothes, and, after making sure it’s alright for a damp Makkachin to have the run of the house, heads out. He doesn’t have a destination in mind. He doesn’t even have a purpose. He walks down the path to the gate, turns left, and heads towards wherever.

Everything is completely unplanned.

 

Japanese beer is satisfying. Japanese drinking culture is even better.

Victor had been aware of both things from his nights out in Tokyo and, once, quite spectacularly in Osaka. Going out in Hasetsu is, of course, a completely new experience. It’s quiet, almost mundane. He goes from one establishment to the next, pointing at what he wants, and paying with whatever numbers they show him. He doesn’t get the sense that he’s being charged anymore than anyone else nor that anyone is judging him. Victor smiles, drinks, pays, and then goes on his way.

He encounters Minako after about several hours of this. She waves him down, effectively interrupting his journey from one bar to the next. Her alpha scent is strong, almost overpowering. It’s obvious she was at her studio.

“Busy day?”

“Yeah,” she says; her Russian is quite good, which must have been useful in her days traveling internationally in the ballet. “I was just going to get a bite to eat.”

They end up at a family style restaurant. The lighting is very bright, which Victor is hard-pressed to appreciate since he’d been pub crawling beforehand. The restaurant is nearly empty. Minako orders tea. There is only one type of beer on the menu. Victor, because he isn’t quite drunk yet, feels suddenly self-conscious.

“What’s good here?”

“Beef curry,” Minako says.

The restaurant has one of the most extensive curry menus that Victor has ever seen. None of it looks appealing. He’s not in a food mood. He orders a plain green salad because that is what Yakov would have wanted him to do. Minako is polite enough not to laugh aloud at whatever expression he has when it arrives along with her curry. 

“It’s times like this I’m glad to be done with that life,” she says as Victor drowns his sorrows in the last of his beer.

The salad makes a valiant effort in presentation but tastes as good as a plain salad can. Minako cheerfully tucks into her curry, and Victor wonders to himself why he even bothers. He is, in many people’s eyes, effectively retired now. 

The thought makes him irritated with himself.

“I’m not,” he says.

Minako smiles, more than a little wolfishly. “You’re not,” she agrees before spoon more curry sauce over her rice.

She’s a good person. Victor hasn’t had much time to interact with her other than to learn who she is to Yuuri and how she can help him get back into shape. She’s one of the few people he’s encountered in Hasetsu that left the town for a significant amount of time and the only person besides Yuuri who had success abroad. He senses that she has a hardness, and he suspects that she’s far more protective of Yuuri than she readily shows. Victor suspects Yuuri was a large reason why she decided to stay in Hasetsu.

He wonders if Yuuri realises this. Considering how easy a relationship they have, probably not. 

“Victor?”

They are standing together on the bridge. Victor watches the moonlight on the sea. This time of the year, he would usually be talking with sponsors for next year. Last year, he’d gotten so many offers that his agent and solicitor had had to coordinate to make sure that they weren’t breaking any rules with what Victor decided upon. There had been a lot of press speculation regarding what designers he’d have for his formal wear and costumes. Victor hadn’t been excited at all.

“I’m a little drunk,” Victor says, apologetically.

“Yes,” Minako says. 

There’s a strange pause. Victor blinks. Glances over. Minako is watching him. It’s not a dissecting gaze. It isn’t even prying. Victor doesn’t know what it is.

“Do you like the sea?” she asks, casual and level.

“Yes,” Victor says.

“Do you like Hasetsu?” and it’s the same tone; this could be an informal interview. “Isn’t it boring for you, after all you’ve seen?”

“I like Hasetsu,” Victor says; he smiles even though something in his stomach hurts. “I don’t think it’s boring.”

“If it isn’t boring,” she asks, and suddenly Victor is incredibly aware of her alpha scent, heady and salty and harsh, “then how would you describe it?”

Victor looks back out at the sea. At the moon, the waves, the shore. He breathes in. Out. Salt permeates every inch of the air. He has spent his life surrounded by alphas. They all smell of salt, especially when he misses something important.

He looks at Minako. She stares back. 

“I don’t know,” he says.

She breathes in. Breathes out. Her eyes do not move at all.

“Fair enough.”

They part ways at Yu-Topia. Victor suspects that Minako deliberately decided to drop by to visit with Yuuri’s parents to make sure that he could find his way back. He had been tempted to make a bad joke about Russian alcohol tolerance, but it would have likely fallen flat. Scentless. She gives his a long look as he waves her into the gate.

“I’m in a lively mood,” he says, shrugging widely and smiling. “The night’s young.”

“I’ll let them know you’re out,” she calls after him.

“Thanks!” Victor calls. “You’re a star!”

The fact of the matter is Victor is adrift. 

He has not experienced very much outside of skating. His life before ice skating is lost to the fragmented impressions of toddlerhood. Since then, it’s been his life. His sole love. He does not remember what it was like to be sixteen. He doesn’t even remember what it was like to be twenty-three. Victor does not live his life concerned with specifics. Skating has always been enough.

It had to be.

Yakov yelled at him so much for that. He didn’t plan. He didn’t think of other possibilities. And, on more than a handful occasions, Yakov pulled him aside, at first with a fistful of hair and later by the collar of his shirt. He sat Victor down and brewed tea, and he sighed when Victor wouldn’t add more water than tea.

“You won’t be in your prime forever,” he said, draping a blanket around Victor’s shoulders or helping him put a plaster on over a blister. “You have to plan for the future.”

“I’m not that type of person,” Victor said from beneath the blanket. 

“I can’t be that person,” he whispered into Yakov’s shoulder as his feet, ankles, everything ached.

They never talked about retirement. They couldn’t. For Victor, retirement is death. The fire goes out. The flower withers. It is not sad. It is not glad. It is simply the way of things.

Victor understands now.

He wants to tell Yakov. He skates around and around as the sun moves across the sky. He wishes he could sit at Yakov’s feet and rest his head upon that familiar knee. He would talk about these thoughts and recount the day just as he has done thousands of times in the past. Yakov would tell him to stop thinking so much, to eat the vegetables that Lilia used to make him eat, and to go to bed at a reasonable time.

Those days are over. Victor has made his choice. He misses Yakov furiously.

Skating Agape is about this. At least, it would be if Victor was skating it. Victor figures this out on the third day of watching Yuri and Yuuri practicing the routines. Both of them are still feeling out their routines. It gives their movements a robotic quality that annoys Victor, even though he knows that it’s part of the learning process. He knows they both have the capacity to understand the routines. It’s just a matter of them figuring out what it is. 

Unlike Yuuri, though, Yuri is raw. Yuuri has years and experience that makes his still unrefined practice of Eros easier on the eye with refined musicality and expression. Yuri skates, moves, breathes like he’s about to spontaneously combust. Victor watches him and Yuuri out of the corner of his eye as he talks to Yuko about preparations for the exhibition. He runs on the treadmill and watches how Yuri unconsciously attempts to outdo Yuuri in sit-ups. They are living every ounce of their physicality, but they express themselves completely differently.

“I feel,” Victor says as he walks Makkachin on the beach before nightfall, “like they are mirror images of each other.”

Makkachin snuffles. Noses around in a pile of seaweed. Victor holds the leash. Loops the wide handle between his fingers. The tide is rising. Technically, they shouldn’t be down here at this time.

“What would Yakov do?” he asks aloud.

When Victor was Yuri’s age, fifteen and just about to break into the senior ranks, Yakov sat down with him in his office. They had tea. Back then, Yakov allowed Victor a biscuit because he was starting the first of his major growth spurts. At the time, he’d assumed he’d only have the one. He was tentatively excited. The possibilities of his future seemed endless. 

That was why Yakov told him, pointblank:

“You aren’t going to be an alpha.”

It wasn’t cruel. He had said much the same before, just not so bluntly. Victor hadn’t even been disappointed. Not really. The alpha advantage in earlier presentation faded out by nineteen when the majority of people presented. Victor was willing to wait to reach his prime. Secretly, he had been even more glad that he would be able to play with his potential presentation for a bit longer. Not forever, he assured himself as he choreographed routines for that year. He would be happy when it happened.

He had been so sure.

Victor sighs. He leads Makkachin back to the stairs to head up to the bridge and back to Yu-Topia no more certain on how to deal with this than when he left. He doesn’t have Yakov’s certainty with this sort of thing. He prefers a direct approach, just like Yakov, but it wouldn’t work here. Telling Yuri that he is going to be an alpha won’t solve his arrogance. It probably won’t even make him happy. He’s not the type of person to relish an advantage. 

Neither, Victor realises suddenly, is Yuuri. It’s part of what makes him so difficult to read as an alpha.

Victor arrives back at Yu-Topia feeling horribly homesick and confused. Thankfully, only Hiroko is around, and she’s more than happy to fetch him katsudon and a beer to wallow in. He flips the stations on the dining room television before settling on a channel of game shows with lots of bright colours of which he understands about ten percent. It’s spectacularly entertaining.

“We should import this,” he tells Yuri when he and Yuuri show up for their dinner.

“What’s wrong with Russian beer,” Yuri snarls, plopping down heavily.

“No, no,” Victor says; he jabs his finger at the television. “This show. It’s—see? What they’re doing now? With the tube! It’s genius!”

Yuri stares him like he’s grown another head. Yuuri looks back and forth between them. Victor pours the rest of his beer into his glass. Takes a long drink. Yuuri and Yuri exchange sideways glances. Victor reaches for Makkachin. He rubs his hands up and down furry sides

“How did it go today?” he asks in English.

“I’m so hungry,” Yuri groans as Hiroko sets his serving of katsudon in front of him, “but I lack the strength to sit up and eat.”

“Wow,” Victor says as Hiroko serves Yuuri.

Yuuri just stares at his sad dish of noodles and broccoli. Victor is strongly reminded of his salad the night before. He looks at the television. The host is announcing the next challenge. It involves an inflatable baseball bat. This is getting silly. He picks up the remote and turns it off. He finally feels hungry enough for his food.

“I’ve got it!” Yuuri yells.

He’s on his feet, the table rocking as he slaps his left hand down on it. His eyes are alight. He pumps his fist. He smells—

“Katsudon! That’s what Eros means to me!”

Victor is in despair.


	4. Chapter 4

Victor has twelve new sponsorship offers in his inbox.

“Even though I’m not competing?” he asks his solicitor as he adds edamame to Makkachin’s breakfast. “I really am coaching now, you know.”

“You’re still the most recognisable face in the sport,” his solicitor answers, blunt and bland as she always has been. “If your students are successful, it’ll be even better press for them, so.”

“Well,” Victor says, breaking a fish oil pill over the kibble and edamame, “that’s true, but couldn’t what I choose conflict with my students’ own sponsorship?”

“It could,” his solicitor agrees, “so you should think about it. Under Armour and Chanel’s offers are particularly generous this year.”

It gives Victor a headache. He reads the emails as he skates around in circles. The sun slowly rising outside. He left Makkachin with Yuko, who is in the front office tidying up for the day. She was kind enough to come early so that he can have the rink to himself. She even showed him how the overhead music system works. Prokofiev plays overhead. The playlist has turned into _Romeo and Juliet_. 

Juliet as a young girl.

Victor feels himself smile. He pockets his phone. He skates around. Closes his eyes. 

He thinks about Lilia. Victor knows her far better than his own mother, much as he knows Yakov better than his own father. She is harder than Yakov. She was colder in her criticisms and far more difficult to please. She braided Victor’s hair when it grew long. She taught him how to pin it into a bun and how to tie a low ponytail so it would tangle less in his sleep. 

“You’ve ended up with a high forehead,” she pointed out when he was twenty-two. “Long hair makes you look childish.” 

She took him the next day to get his hair cut. It was a traumatising experience. Victor hadn’t had short hair since he was about eight, and his head felt so light after the hairdresser was done that he irrationally feared it would detached from his neck if he turned his head too fast. Lilia drove him to the salon, stayed in the waiting room, and drove him home afterwards. She walked him up to his flat and stood in the doorway as Makkachin greeted him.

“You’ve grown up well,” she said when he straightened up to invite her in. 

Victor comes out of a camel spin abruptly because he can feel his phone starting to slip out of his pocket. He shoves it back in. It would be a pain to get the screen replaced. The music overhead has changed to Debussy. Outside, the sun has risen, which means that Yuuri and Yuri will be arriving soon. Or they might already be here and just getting ready. Makkachin and Yuko will have let them know that Victor is already here.

He skates to the edge of the rink. Leans over it to toss his phone on top of his bag. He hangs on the wall. Listens to the music overhead. 

He closes his eyes.

 

It continues in this vein for a few days.

Yuuri shows slow but steady improvement. He struggles with the jumps for Eros, but that is to be expected. He’s still in the process of getting back into shape. He shows signs of his musical intuition in the step sequences. There are fleeting moments where Victor can seem him living and breathing the song and choreography together. It’s like the crunchy bits in katsudon, just lightly touched with egg and sauce.

Yuri, on the other hand, does not show much improvement. He can skate Agape with technical preciseness, but it’s lifeless. It’s better than robotic, which would be uncomfortable to watch, but it means that Yuri still doesn’t understand the routine. Victor isn’t surprised. Love is the most difficult thing to understand. Yuri is fifteen. He is painfully young. 

Attempting to coach Yuri makes Victor extremely aware of his age. He wishes that he paid more attention to what it was like for himself when he was fifteen. There’s hours of video and a whole archive of articles of Victor’s fifteenth year, but he hadn’t focused on it. He had focused, as Yuri is doing, on his potential for success. It was all he desired. The ice loved him, and he loved it, too.

Yuri needs more than that.

It’s why Victor tries increasingly imaginative ways to get Yuri to find inspiration for Agape. Temples didn’t work, so he tries a waterfall that he looked up the address of during lunch. Takeshi agreed to act as a guide. He sends Yuuri along, too, because being out of the rink will do him good. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of overwork. Visits to scenic locations and going out into nature are a good way to refresh the mind as well as the body. The air in Hasetsu is good, too. 

Victor stays behind. He skates in circles, aware that Yuko is watching him from the main doors.. The triplets are with Minako this afternoon. Ballet and babysitting. Yuko clears her throat.

“Do you want music?” 

“No,” Victor says, and he smiles at her before leaning down to tighten his skates. “Thank you.”

He straightens up. Turns. He begins to make wide, aimless loops. The ice is cut up from practice. That’s fine. 

Victor breathes in. Out.

When he skates like this, the world is different.

For the past two years, Victor has had to begin to face the slow, unsteady decline of his body. A deep, almost debilitating cough plagued him for much of the season in which he won his fourth Grand Prix gold. He managed to hide it from the press, but the cough forced him to withdraw from additional exhibitions. He spent so much time attending medical appointments he ended up on first name basis with his respiratory physician’s family. 

“It’s overwork,” was the conclusion that was eventually reached after two months of tests turned up nothing out of the ordinary.

“I can’t—” Victor wheezed as Christophe rubbed his back; they had been making out when a fit started, “believe this.”

“You need to rest,” Christophe started. 

“No,” Victor snapped, which made him start coughing again.

Christophe ended up making him hot chocolate to wash the taste of the inhaler he’d been prescribed away. They were Victor’s flat in St. Petersburg, which he’d just moved to from the much smaller flat he’d bought at eighteen. It was all new furniture, fittings, appliances. Victor regretted moving. Makkachin was having a hard time adjusting to the unfamiliar space.

“Sorry,” Victor said as Christophe sat on the floor next to the couch to pet Makkachin.

“Don’t be,” he said, but he was looking at Victor sideways, unhappy and concerned. 

What he can’t tell Christophe—not then, maybe not ever—is that skating is his life. Victor doesn’t remember a time when it wasn’t the sole focus of his existence. He started when he was four. He doesn’t reliably remember a life without skating or ballet being at least half of his day. It brought him fame, fortune, and shining, splendid glory. He was Midas, and all things on the ice turned to gold. 

By that fourth Grand Prix Gold, Victor was deeply, painfully disenchanted with his life.

Christophe is many things, but he is an alpha, and alpha tend to be jealous. They hate not being the best. Victor’s dominance in the skating world is a sore point for a lot of people, and Victor doubts that even Christophe would forgive him for vocalising that he was bored. Georgi knows it without Victor having to say anything, and that’s a major factor of why their relationship fell apart. Saying it aloud would make him sound ungrateful. Far more self-centred than usual. That isn’t want Victor feels at all. 

Skating used to feel like making love. Like being in love. Nothing loves him as thoroughly and simply as the ice. Victor can still feel that, even on his worst days when all he can do is skate circles. But he can’t return the love, not like he used to when his body was young and healthy and unstoppable. The air remains cool and unscented. 

Victor raises his hands. Breathes in. Out. 

He swallows. His heart hammers.

He wants.

The intensity of the wanting—uncontrolled, unfettered, and so, so blunt—scares him. He stands for a long moment with his hands clutching themselves. Pressed against his lips. His breath ghosts up around his knuckles. His eyes burn.

He wishes he could run screaming to Yakov.

Victor skates to the wall. Leans on it. He stares forward, unable to concentrate on anything in particular. Maybe it was a mistake to come here to Hasetsu. He certainly doesn’t feel qualified to be a coach. He feels like a mime who keeps breaking character. Victor is a skater, and as a skater he is one of the best. Here, he is out of his depth.

“You’re not human,” he can hear Georgi drunkenly telling him in a memory from that time in London when he threw up in a planter box. “You’re a, a, a imposter.”

“Please get in the cab,” Victor pleaded because there was a shadowed figure at the end of the road, and the cabbie was signalling them urgently. 

Victor shakes his head. Steps off the ice. He sits down on the bench and leans over to unlace his skates. He spends a few minutes checking the insides and the blades before pulling off his socks and examining his feet. He needs to moisturise his soles. He still needs to decide on the rest of the sponsorship offers. He needs to arrange time to talk about the sponsorship situation with Yuri or Yuuri. Needs to figure out what exactly he’s going to say. Money is more of an issue for both of them. He doesn’t want to create any financial conflicts.

“Life is hard,” he tells Makkachin as they do their evening round on the beach.

Makkachin doesn’t look at him, far more interested in sniffing a pile of tangled seaweed and debris that has washed up against a bumpy patch of rock. Victor sniffles. Reaches up and rubs his nose. The weather is warm for this time of the year. It’s causing minor seasonal allergies. 

“I want them to be successful,” he says, moving to sit down on the largest rock, which has a dry patch in the side furthest from the sea. “They have a lot of skill. Yuri is so young, too. He’s going to be an alpha. And Yuuri is older, but he’s still an alpha. He has so much potential. And I…”

He pulls his right leg up against his chest. Rests his chin on his knee. Makkachin paws at the bulbous parts of the seaweed, panting and bright-eyed. So curious. So innocent. Agape.

Victor aches.

 

Something wakes Victor in the middle of the night.

At first, he thinks it’s Makkachin, but the familiar weight against his right side is still there. Victor sits up, rubbing his eyes and then his nose. His phone shows him 2:49 as he flips it over while sniffling. He grabs a tissue from behind his bed. Blows his nose. 

There is the soft noises of someone shuffling down the hallway.

Victor shifts. Gets out of bed. Tosses the used tissue in the bin. He moves in bare feet to where he dumped his nightclothes. He pulls them on before opening his room’s doors. There’s a light on in the main part of the inn. Victor blinks once. Twice. He moves down the corridor. Towards light.

Yuri looks up abruptly when Victor appears in the doorway of the dining room. He has an apple in hand. There’s a large bite taken out of it. His mouth is full. He stares at Victor with large eyes. He looks scared.

“Hot water,” Victor says, and he moves to the kitchen to get himself a cup.

When he comes back, Yuri has swallowed the bite he had held in his mouth. He hasn’t taken another. His eyes track Victor’s progress from the kitchen to the opposite side of the table. They burn against Victor’s skin as he sits down and blows steam from the top of the hot water. It is a long moment before he looks away. Back to the apple in his hands.

“Eat,” Victor says, his lips against the rim of his cup. 

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Yuri hisses, but he takes a bite out of the apple immediately after that.

They sit for a while like that. Yuri eating. Victor drinking. The dining room is quiet but not unpleasant. It, like the entirety of Yu-Topia, has a comfortable feeling. It’s a place where people live and breathe, soaking up all they can and still finding more. 

“Victor.” 

He looks over. Yuri has eaten everything of the apple that he can, even the bitter hard parts of the core. He rolls the stem and seeds on the tabletop. He doesn’t look at Victor.

“What does Makkachin mean to you?”

Victor blinks. He sets down his cup. He looks at his hands. His fingers and upper parts of his palm have turned pink from the heat. 

“Makkachin is precious,” and he smiles, even though it hurts a little. “Dogs have short lives, and their love is pure. So I try to return that as best as I am able.”

Yuri is quiet. Victor runs the pad of his right forefinger around the rim of his cup. Yuri breathes in. Swallows audibly.

“I’m going to bed,” he says, unusually soft.

“Sleep well,” Victor murmurs.

He waits until Yuri’s door has slid shut again before he stands up. He takes his half-drunken cup with him to his room. Makkachin is still asleep. Victor takes off his nightclothes. Climbs back into bed. He shifts a little lower than usual to wrap his arms around Makkachin. 

He wakes up about three hours later in exactly the same position because Makkachin is breathing directly in his face, wide awake and ready for breakfast. Victor sits up with a groan. He stretches. His lower back, left shoulder, and right hip pop.

“No- _oh_ …”

He allows himself a long moment of self-pity before he drags himself out of bed. He uses the restroom, pulls out a clean set of workout clothes, and pats Makkachin on the head as they go out into the hall. Hiroko is up already. She smiles at them as she passes by the front door where Victor is putting his shoes on. 

“Good morning,” she says in Russian.

“Good morning,” Victor says automatically before realising what’s happened and standing up straight; he’s smiling before he can catch himself. “Good morning,” he says again and means it; “Good morning.”

Hiroko smiles at him before heading to place the fresh cushions in her arms in the public dining room. Victor takes Makkachin out, grinning like a loon. The weather is good again. Victor takes off his coat. He holds it to his chest while Makkachin sniffs around in the grass. 

He feels warm.

 

Something has clicked. 

Yuri stares. Victor stares back. 

“Do it again,” he says, flat and harsh because Yuri won’t take him seriously unless he acts like Yakov. “Pay better attention to your arms.”

Yuri grits his teeth but turns to obey. The music starts again. Victor watches. Yuri isn’t yet, but it looks less like he’s mimicking the movements and more as if he’s feeling them out. It’s less robotic. Less exact. It lacks the flow that would begin to give the routine beauty, but it’s better than the days before when watching Yuri made Victor privately so frustrated that he wanted to retire. 

Perhaps, Victor muses, Yuri’s also getting homesick. 

He knows a bit about Yuri’s home life. Despite his abrasiveness, he works hard to support a family from which Victor has only ever encountered or heard of a grandfather. Yuri’s grandfather shows up when they go through Moscow, and Yuri inevitably eats too many of his homemade piroshki. Yuri would understand love, at least in this form. It is simple and good with the scent of family and home.

“The waterfall was a great idea,” Victor announces after Yuri completes the routine for him at the end of practice. 

“It–” Yuri notices the triplets have shown up and are watching intently with Yuko, “was not!”

Victor laughs. He runs his fingers through his hair. He knows from the odd looks that Yuuri, Takeshi, and Yuko keep throwing him from where they’re watching at the wall that his behaviour is making them unconscious attempt to scent him. He would feel self-conscious, but there’s no paparazzi posts on social media, so he’s hardpressed to care too much. 

“Alright,” Victor says, motioning towards Yuuri. “Let’s see you.”

Yuuri also shows improvement. He’s become in the short span of six days much more confident in his entrances into the jumps. It’s a treat to watch his step sequences, especially now that they’ve started to take on their own flavour. 

“Your steps are the onions,” Victor says, and he can’t help but smile as he says it because Yuuri turns pink. “Soft and just starting to be caramelised. That delicate flavour—”

Victor licks his lips while inhaling. A trick he learned from an omega-on-omega porno he watched when he was seventeen. Yuuri’s eyes go wider than saucers. His alpha scent explodes. A storm wave. Victor feels it. He tilts his head slightly. Exposes his neck.

“Show it to me.”

Practice is exhilarating for the first time. Both Yuuri and Yuri throw themselves into the routines. Victor imitates Yakov whenever he opens his mouth, but it feels less painful than before. Yuuri lags behind Yuri on the fluidity of his jumps, and Yuri still has not fully grasped the pure beauty that Agape demands. These are easy things for Victor to criticise because they are tangible issues. Yuuri is not up to form completely yet. Yuri lacks experience. 

“You are both very capable,” Victor says after calling practice to an end, “so show me your best tomorrow.” 

They look at him. Intense and strong and wanting. 

They want to win.

They fill Victor with pride.


End file.
